Shining Bright

The Sun is a publishing phenomenon. Thirty years ago, Sy Safransky, the magazine's founder, editor and publisher, sold photocopied issues on the street in Chapel Hill, North Carolina for 35 cents. Today, the ad-free, non-profit, literary/political magazine has 70,000 loyal subscribers worldwide. The Sun publishes interviews, short stories, essays, poems, letters to the editor, and--what sets the magazine apart from others of its sort--personal essays written by readers in response to a monthly topic.

Readers, even faithful ones, describe The Sun as serious, sad, depressing. With stories and essays that are generally about death, substance abuse, the war and dysfunctional families one could argue that the slant of The Sun is toward the glum end of the spectrum. But, when these topics are dealt with in rich, faultless prose, what might sound depressing can also be uplifting.

Christina Rosalie Sbarro's essay, The Things You Forget, is a mesmerizing second person interior monologue on her life, about raising her young boy and caring for her dying father. The overall tone of the essay is melancholic, but passages describing her son are transcendent: "You cannot remember your father alive, or dying, because it is summer and your small boy is curled between you and the man you love." The Things You Forget is so finely written, it's more prose poem than essay.

The Sun is about the transformation of grief and suffering into acceptance, maybe even joy. The magazine's motto, taken from the Austrian psychiatrist and holocaust survivor, Viktor Frankl, is "What is to give light must endure burning." Some of the essays in The Sun are like cathartic art, everything is exposed: fears, prejudices, failings, frailties, so that they are given light and ultimately lose their hold on the artist.

University of Mississippi writing instructor, Louis E. Bourgeois, appears for the second time in The Sun with Ponchatoula, a continuation of his memoir about losing his arm in a car accident at 19, then attending college instead of his first two choices: death-metal guitarist or Marine gunner. In Ponchatoula, the young, angry Bourgeois is trapped with a fellow student and his wife and child in their house trailer outside town. He is repulsed by this "hideous couple in their terrible house," and yet is equally self-hating, "Before my accident, I wouldn't have been caught dead with a woman like Charlotte." Bourgeois is honest about his prejudices and his sensitivities as well. He stands in a crowd looking at a sideshow alligator in a pen and identifies with the alligator: "I had the sense that I should have been in the cage, with people gathered round to stare at me, the poor animal." Eventually, the crowd begins to take notice of his empty sleeve and he is pinned, trapped again, this time, by the objectifying stares of onlookers--and the bitterness, the anger, the sensitivity fall into place, and we understand.

The August issue includes an interview by David Kupfer with Judy Wicks, the founder of The White Dog Cafe and local movement activist. Wicks--whose cafe sells locally grown food and imported fair trade coffees--envisions a system of interconnected local communities where food and clothing, even automobiles are produced locally. She is a radical thinker, but not an enemy of the profit motive. "I've dabbled in nonprofit work, but it doesn't have the same energy. There's something about being able to make money doing what you love." The difference is, in Wicks' world, profits would be spent and invested locally.

Michelle Cacho-Negrette's essay, Tell Me Something, serves as both political and personal, as she recounts the death of her brother in Viet Nam and the birth of her anti-war activism: "I wept that my brother--sensitive, good-natured, astonished by cruelty--had been sent to Viet Nam. I wanted to prevent the same from happening to any other boy."

An issue of The Sun wouldn't be complete without a piece by Sparrow, a contributor to the magazine for over 20 years. My God Journal is an absurdist comic essay on the author's attempts to communicate with God--over the phone.

Meghan Wynne's short story, Stuck, is an eccentric mother, bored teenager story, focusing on the mother's predicament with a lodged contraceptive sponge. The characters are a bit too familiar, the story a little too contrived. That aside, Stuck moves along nicely, while we get the sense that both mother and daughter are stuck as much as the sponge is.

Two poems appear in this issue. Mark Belair's, narrative poem, all i knew, describes the transmission of talent from grandparent to grandchild, not through example, but through story. Katrina Vandenberg's, One Argument For The Existence Of God, another narrative poem, describes a couple having a spat in a restaurant. They argue through dinner and when they prepare to leave, discover that someone has paid their bill for them. "we wondered/who he was, what he had heard/whether he loved or pitied us."

The Sun is not just about the writing. Photography takes up a fair share of the content. Stories and essays are often illustrated with black and white photos. Incidental images appear throughout. This issue includes contributions from 15 photographers--some professional, some not--as well as a photo essay by Ethan Hubbard, titled, What They Taught Me. Hubbard's portraits of folks around the world are combined with his own text describing how each person lives.

Most Sun readers will tell you that Readers Write is their favorite section of the magazine. The topic for this issue was, "Up All Night." Of the 20 essays published, responses ranged from loss of sleep due to Alzheimer's, to a still-birth, to newly weds with an overnight layover in an Italian airport.

The genius of The Sun is that by focusing on the human condition it invites a readership who feel a sense of connection to the writers and the magazine, and who, in turn, are encouraged to share their own stories. Thus, a loyal subscriber--and a writer--are born.